by Bennett Sims
Praise for A Questionable Shape
•BARD FICTION PRIZE 2014
•THE BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST
•ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2013 —Complex Magazine, Book Riot, Slate, The L Magazine, NPR’s On Point, Salon
“Equal parts David Foster Wallace and Richard Matheson […] A Questionable Shape is certainly the first Proustian zombie novel, but hopefully not the last horror novel of ideas.” —Slate
“A Questionable Shape is a rewriting of the genre in rather literal sense… Sims’ zombie novel perhaps contains the highest proportion of great descriptions of light per page since Proust.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Evokes the power of David Foster Wallace with a narrative that’s cerebral, strangely beautiful, philosophical, and pretty, well, brilliant.” —Bustle
“A Questionable Shape presents the yang to the yin of Whitehead’s Zone One, with chess games, a dinner invitation, and even a romantic excursion. Echoes of [Thomas] Bernhard’s hammering circularity and [David Foster] Wallace’s bright mind that can’t stop making connections are both present. The point is where the mind goes, and, in that respect, Sims has his thematic territory down cold.” —The Daily Beast
“Unlike anything I’d ever read. Underlying the seemingly quirky subject matter of Sims’ novel is a notable linguistic dynamism and impressive command of philosophical challenges. Sims’ work has a life of its own.” —Full Stop
“Yes, it’s a zombie novel, but also an emotionally resonant meditation on memory and loss.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Sims demonstrates he isn’t just smart—he’s brilliant; his book’s not beautiful—it’s gorgeous. It’s sensitive, insightful and ruminative, which aren’t always things you get to say about zombie fiction, let alone most books.” —The L Magazine
Versions of these stories appeared in the following publications: ‘House-sitting’ in Tin House; ‘The Bookcase’ in Zoetrope: All-Story; ‘Ekphrases’ in A Public Space; ‘Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute’ in Story; ‘City of Wolfmen’ in The Iowa Review; ‘Destroy All Monsters’ in Orion Magazine; ‘Fables’ in Conjunctions and Subtropics (as ‘The Balloon’), as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology; ‘A Premonition’ in Gigantic; ‘Radical Closure’ in Conjunctions; ‘White Dialogues’ in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.
For Sam
CONTENTS
House-sitting
The Bookcase
Ekphrases
Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute
City of Wolfmen
Destroy All Monsters
Fables
Za
A Premonition
Radical Closure
White Dialogues
House-sitting
‘Spiders as nature’s craziness, I often think.’
—Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles
Within moments of arriving at the cabin, you begin to suspect that the owner is a madman.
The place is in a state of disrepair. Isolated from the mountain town of N— by half an hour’s drive, and separated from the road by a mile’s hike down a narrowing footpath, the cabin is a perfect hermitage: a single-story log structure standing alone in a weedy grass field, which is itself in the middle of the mountainside’s thick pine forests. Hidden from sight, the property has been allowed to dilapidate. The front yard’s weeds have grown waist-high, and they advance on the cabin as far as its banister. When a wind blows to bend them, seed-gone grasses lap at the porch. And leaning close to the cabin are a couple of pine trees whose untrimmed branches rake at its roof. The cabin could not look any more like a ruin. Yet you have reason to know that it is not a ruin. A human being—the cabin’s owner, your new employer—still lives in this place. If the property is disheveled, then it must mirror the dishevelment of his mind.
You have never met the owner. You have not even spoken with him over the phone. When you responded to his house-sitting advertisement, he wrote back within days, asking whether you would be available to begin immediately. He had, apparently, already left. A key would be waiting for you beneath a stone on the porch. Because you live in the foothills of the mountain, and because you had arranged no other employment for the summer, it had not been a problem for you to pack your bag that night and set out first thing in the morning. In this way you—without so much as an interview—accepted a house-sitting position in a cabin in the woods.
Once inside, you make a quick inspection of the cabin. It is not the quaint woodland cottage you had been expecting, but for just a summer it will be serviceable. In the kitchen you turn knobs at the sink, and water runs, ruddily, from the faucet. Flipping switches, you find that there is power. For the most part, the interior of the cabin exudes the same air of abandonment as the outside. Some tables and chairs, a desk. In the bedroom an unsheeted mattress, stained, lying on the floorboards. And the walls, closets, shelves, and drawers: all perversely empty. You search the living room for a book or magazine, but see nothing: only the coffee table with its three chairs, a fourth chair in the corner. And opening the drawers of the bedroom dresser, you satisfy yourself that not a single article of clothing has been left behind. There could just as well be no one living here.
Seemingly the only personal possession of the owner’s are the dreamcatchers that he has strung in all the windows. Their feathered nets flash out at you from every pane. The bedroom window, naturally. But also in the small window above the kitchen sink, a dreamcatcher, and in the three windows arranged across the dining room’s northern wall, dreamcatchers. Where there are panes of glass in the doors, dreamcatchers in the doors. Even in the bathroom, you pull back the shower curtain to reveal a dreamcatcher in the stall’s brick-sized window. When you see it you have to laugh. The sheer excess: no glass in the cabin is unprotected by these webs. By these prophylaxes against nightmare.
Now here, you think, is a man absolutely terrified of nightmares.
When you finish unpacking your duffel bag you stand at the bedroom window, idly fingering the dreamcatcher there. Through the pane, you can see that the back lawn is equally weedy and lush as the front. Tall grasses stretch for a few hundred yards to a final stand of pines, as straight and dark as a squall line. The property ends where the forest begins, and each day the border between them must grow more blurred.
You try to imagine what sort of man would live this way. You have been assuming that the owner is older: rangy and gaunt, with a white beard and unkempt hair; retired, probably, and living out his last years on a pension, alone in hermitic reclusion. But in truth you have no idea how old he is, or how long he has been living in the cabin, or where—other than this cabin—he could even be staying right now. Nothing in the cabin suggests either that he is retired or that he isn’t; that he practices a specific trade, or what that trade might be. Indeed, the only clue to the owner’s identity is how completely he has avoided the usual traces or clues to identity. And from the absence of these things in the cabin, all you can infer is an absence of them in his life. You survey the empty bedroom and try to imagine him here. You picture an old, bony man, on the mattress on the floor, naked and cradling his knees to his chest—delirious with fear.
You look out the window again at the weedy yard. Yes, you think: he has done what it took to protect himself from these nightmares of his and neglected everything else. While in the meantime what really encroaches on the cabin is wilderness. Brambles and branches close in on the house, and eventually they will fold over it completely, subsuming it, the way that a tree’s bark flows over a nail. That is what the cabin reminds you of, in the end: a nail. Five rooms and a roof hammered into the heart of the forest, where they wait, with the patience of a nail, to become ingrown.
The dreamcatcher hangs from a thin st
ring tied around a bent nail, which the owner has hammered slantwise into the white wood of the window’s lintel. Suspended in the center of the pane, the net is about the size of your fist, and it consists of a hoop of beige willow wood, encircling a mesh middle woven from some kind of synthetic nylon material. The threads—springy and white like basketball netting, and vertebrated with colored beads—overlap one another with the density of a spiderweb. Knotted in places are black crow feathers and pleached twigs that dangle in a fringe. The device, you know, is designed to catch and then neutralize nightmares. It is implicated, as an artifact, in systems of superstition that posit an exogenous source for dreams: some invisible stream or current, some river of imagery, that pours in like moonlight through the bedroom’s window at night, and from there into the sleeper’s ear. The dreamcatcher in the windowpane is meant to function as a filtration mechanism: letting through all the unpolluted, pleasant images, and collecting in its net any effluent of nightmare.
But this does not seem to be the system of superstition in which the owner is participating. If that were the case, a single dreamcatcher would suffice, strung up in the room in which he slept. Rather, the owner seems to have installed them according to a siege principle. In his sheer methodicalness, he could have been embattling his cabin against a mob. Not an inanimate nightmare, then, borne passively along on a stream of dream images, but an incubus: an active force, sentient and intent, determined to get inside the cabin. Probing the windowpanes for weaknesses at night, the blind groping of its dark hand. Every possible entrance has to be accounted for.
You support the hoop of the dreamcatcher in your palm, and the webbing goes slack and limp, draping over your hand like a bolas. When you play your fingers up and down, this tangles your hand even further. Clearly the owner is obsessed: paranoid, fixated, deluded on the matter of nightmares. But less clear, at this moment, are the particular beliefs that have structured that obsession, the private logic or mythology he has evolved. You have never had a nightmare that you still feared after waking—never one so vivid that it made you reluctant to go back to sleep, much less one that made you pace from room to room, hammering in place a barricade of dreamcatchers. Twisting your hand, you extricate it at last from the webbing and release the hoop. It clatters back in place against the glass.
The owner has provided you neither a number nor an address at which he can be reached, not even in case of emergency. And on the fourth day in a row that you drive to his barren postal box in downtown N—, you give up any expectation of receiving further instructions from him. But it is true that all your needs are met. The owner has left half the amount of your cash stipend in a white envelope on the kitchen counter, just as his letter promised. This amount can be made to last until he returns, at which point, you suppose, you have no reason to doubt that he will pay you the rest.
By the end of the first week, you have fallen into a routine. In the mornings you take walks through the surrounding pine forests, sometimes swimming laps in a small pond that you discovered. When in need of groceries, you hike to your car at the trailhead and drive into N—, but otherwise you allow yourself to luxuriate in the seclusion of the cabin. Whole days pass without your seeing or hearing another human being. The advertisement was vague on the question of your duties: you are only to maintain the general upkeep. Really, the post sounded like a sinecure. And because the general upkeep, judging by the state of the lawn, does not need much maintaining, you do not bother tending the property. The one morning you try to, you get no further than searching for equipment. All you can find is a supply shed at the edge of the backyard, a small shack of corrugated tin, with nothing inside that could be of any use to you: an empty tool chest, a cord of firewood, some wattle fencing. And leaning against the side of the shed, a rusted push mower.
Only at night are you reminded that the man is sick. During the day you are able to put it out of your consciousness entirely. But, lying on his mattress, waiting to fall asleep, you stare at the dreamcatcher in the bedroom window and think of every mad thought that has authored it. Each night your last waking thoughts are of the owner and his nightmares, so much so that you half expect to have one yourself. In the mornings you are even mildly surprised to discover that you haven’t. The whole first week in the cabin, your dreams are untroubled and blank, utterly unmemorable mere moments after waking. Perhaps, you catch yourself thinking, the dreamcatchers are working.
Then, on the final evening of that initial week, you suffer what you think of as a waking nightmare. It happens while you are staring at yourself in the owner’s bathroom mirror, getting ready for bed. This is the first time you have really studied your reflection here, and you are struck by the dirtiness of the glass, the way it is covered with thin streaks of grime. The bathroom is closet-sized and, except for the brick of glass in the shower stall, windowless. Behind your reflection in the mirror, you can see the moldy vinyl of the shower’s yellow curtain, and behind that, you know, is the brick-shaped window’s dreamcatcher. Examining the streaks in the mirror, you notice that they, too, form a kind of dreamcatcher: a system of threads crisscrossing its surface in a network.
The streaks are whitish with furrows down the middle, like the contrails of jets. You had assumed at first that they were grime—some naturally occurring buildup or encrustation of mildew—in which case their reticulation would be incidental. But the longer you look at them, the more you convince yourself that they form a deliberate pattern. The lines are too finely controlled to be random. They cut across the mirror in wide crescents, in sustained curves and careful arcs that, occasionally intersecting, overlap in Borromean rings. Every line is a line of intent. Even here, in the bathroom’s mirror, the owner has installed a dreamcatcher! You cannot help imagining how he drew it: leaning over the porcelain sink with a pink wedge of eraser, pressing one corner of the rubber to the mirror and dragging. You picture the owner tracing an entire dreamcatcher in this way, inscribing its protective pattern on the glass.
You try centering your face inside the dreamcatcher’s streaks, until their network is superimposed over you like a wire cage. You stare into your snared reflection. The garish bathroom light makes your eyes seem more sunken and your cheekbones sharper than they are. Transverse streaks cut across your cheeks, your forehead, and your chin, introducing distortions into the reflection. Beneath the streaks your flesh turns the translucent color of flesh behind frosted glass. These arcs of blur seem to mar your skin like scar tissue. The meshwork is totally flat, laid over your face in a two-dimensional grid. But you find that if you focus your eyes on some fixed point—allowing your peripheral vision to soften and letting your reflection merge with the meshwork—it really does look as if the streaks are bending to wrap around your face. They seem to drape over it, like a net.
You focus on your eyes. You look into them until they begin to look back at you, and your face grows estranged in this way. Soon you cease to recognize your own reflection. It looks like a stranger’s face: the sunken eyes, the sharp cheekbones. Deep down, you know that it is your face. But the more intently you stare at it, the less yourself it seems, for it keeps staring intently back at you. In the muscles of your face—in the sensation of the skin on your cheeks and forehead—you feel your expression to be one of focused concentration and scrutiny. Except this is not the expression that the stranger has on its face. Seeing your so-called concentration and scrutiny reflected in its face, you would swear that it is an expression of tranquil hatred. The face in the mirror regards you with quiet, simmering intensity, the sunken eyes murderous above the sharp cheekbones. It looks as if it wants to kill you. It looks as if it is fantasizing about it right now. And the more frightened that this makes you—the more fearful you feel your own face becoming—the more hateful grows the expression on its face. Its hatred seems to grow in direct proportion to your fear. You even feel a paradoxical fear of becoming any more afraid, a panicked need to stop being afraid this instant: not only because your fear is irrational�
��the face is merely a reflection—but also because you want to staunch the strengthening hatred of its face. Yet you cannot help growing afraid: your fear only mounts, and with it, the hatred, and with it, more fear. When you feel the blood draining from your own face, the reflection’s face grows pale, as with rage. And when this makes you short of breath, the reflection’s face tightens, as with rage. And when at this your own eyes dry and widen, the look in the reflection’s eyes is like a nightmare you are having.
Unable any longer to bear the pressure of its gaze, you flinch. You glance away from the mirror and toward the bathroom wall, where, at just this moment, an apricot-colored spider is emerging from behind the right-hand side of the mirror’s frame. It crawls slowly into view, its orange body grotesque against the raw logs. You realize that it must live there, behind the mirror, in that dark centimeter of space. It crawls in a jerky, stop-motion way that is terrible to watch. Its body is coin-sized and finely jointed and where the garish bathroom light catches in its hollow legs, flooding them with warm amber, they look like straws of honey. The fact that the spider lives behind the mirror strikes you as unnatural and unnerving. It lives behind the mirror the way monsters live beneath beds.
Soon the sight of the spider becomes less bearable to you than the memory of your reflection, and you return your attention to the mirror. There the reflection is, still enmeshed in the intersecting streak marks. Remarkably, the face has remained estranged. It is still an other’s face. But now the meshwork of blurred lines resembles a spiderweb, not a dreamcatcher. And you cannot help picturing the spider that has spun it: this sinister spider emerging from behind the mirror at night to crawl across the mirror’s surface, dragging one back leg behind it to streak the glass. You imagine the spider tracing an entire web this way, its apricot body moving over the mirror in the great loops and curves it is used to—instinctively reproducing, with its leg, the pattern programmed into its very being.